The internet era changes the whole hospitality industry in all direction. Hotel marketing strategy for example, is now including interney-related stuffs including online presence, TripAdvisor review, booking experience and website management. These things may sounds unfamiliar in hotel industry 10 years ago. But things have changed and internet is now the new battlefield for hotel competition.
Managing hotel in modern days means more than just making website or providing romantic package. Even when you already have a website, it doesn’t mean that it will affect your business instantly. There are so many factors that may affect your business regarding to your website and it’s always good to avoid these mistakes before you make it. Here we sum some common mistakes most hoteliers usually make in applying hotel marketing strategy via their website.
Not properly show what are people looking for
Every guest has their own needs, which might be different with other guests. If we want to take a look at guest types, every each of them will have its own needs and wants. For example, business traveler will have different kind of need compared to budget traveler. Once you understand what kind of need your customer needs, it will be easier for you to set up the specific facility and service that suits up their needs.
Today, most of hotel’s websites show information about their hotel, service, and room description. They barely fill the information box in their website design. This makes the information not properly shown and make guest cannot find their needs by looking at your hotel website. Therefore they might decide to book in another hotel or maybe via OTA instead. This situation not only could lead you to miss your potential customer but also could make your hotel lose to the competitors.
You need to understand what things that make them decide to book your hotel. After you know that, you can display it on your website properly. For example, make sure that you display your notice on free internet and free amenities facility on your hotel to attract budget traveler. In addition, it also needs to be well designed & attractive for customers. It is important to make sure customers are interested to book your hotel.
Hotel room not properly displayed
It is ironic that most hotels are unable to show their hotel room properly. The common practice is to show hotel room mostly focused on decorated items, such as chocolate, or even flower vase. Although it shows nice emotional picture, but it missed the main purpose of room display, which is to show how hotel room look like.
To show your hotel room properly, you need to understand what is your guests looking from a hotel room. It is essential to be able to make potential guest know how your hotel room look and feel. There are various ways to display your hotel room. For example, showing a detailed picture of the room or show different views from different room corner. The most important thing is how they can easily get an overview of the room and notice the essential features of your room.
Complicated booking process
The last situation you want is when a potential guest are unable to book your hotel room due to complicated process. Some hotel requires to take multiple steps and many forms before finish the booking. This is not the best practice. There’s a big chance for you to lose potential guests when you have fuzzy booking process on your website.
To make sure that your hotel website has better booking process, you’ll need a well-designed and informative booking engine. Well-designed booking engine will not only make sure potential guest has easier and clear information about hotel. It will also simplify the steps to finish booking process.
Conclusion
The essential key for hotel marketing strategy via website is by understanding your customer needs. In summary, your website needs to clearly show information that needed by your guest. It also needs to have good room display to give overview what they will get from your hotel room. In addition of that, simple booking process is also important to serve nice booking experience for your guests.
To able to understand your guest, you can start by trying to ask your guest about what they looking when they book a hotel. You can also study various marketing research related to customers in travel or hospitality industry. Better understanding of various type of customers will help you to determine which practice is the best for your hotel marketing on the web.
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